“I have whole new eyes for bricks,” says Elizabeth Stone, headmaster at Winchester College. “I now wander around Winchester muttering, ‘Oh yes, that’s very fine brickwork’ and ‘Look how thin that mortar is, obviously that was an expensive house back in 1798’.”
Stone is sitting in her study with Kaori Ohsugi, director of architectural studio Stanton Williams, and Christopher Bradley-Hole, founder of Bradley-Hole Schoenaich Landscape. The elegant room, part of the Old Headmaster’s House designed by Victorian architect George Repton, overlooks the Hampshire school’s medieval cloisters where student graffiti from hundreds of years earlier includes a game of noughts and crosses etched into the wall. Founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, to help replenish a shortage of educated clergy in the wake of the Black Death, Winchester has the longest continuous history of any school in England. This September, almost 650 years after it was established, it will welcome its first female boarders into the sixth form.
This is the reason for Stone’s newfound interest in masonry. At the south end of the campus, two houses designed by Stanton Williams are set to accommodate Winchester’s new cohort. “The girls coming in need a sense of identity and of belonging,” says Ohsugi. “We asked the question: is it a college building with a house or a big house? The decision was to make something in between. So the exterior looks like a big house and inside we’ve kept a bit of informality, with cloisters creating a heart, a community feel.”
